


A Little Piece of My Heart

by opalmatrix



Category: Saga (Comics)
Genre: Childhood Friends, Games, Gen, Love, Secrets, Trouble
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-11
Packaged: 2019-04-21 09:29:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14281986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/opalmatrix/pseuds/opalmatrix
Summary: Hazel doesn't always listen to Izabel anymore. But that doesn't mean she doesn't need her.





	A Little Piece of My Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [afinch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/afinch/gifts).



> I'm so glad to find someone else who loves Izabel and Hazel! Beta by [**Ambyr**](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ambyr/pseuds/ambyr).

Does a place with no daytime actually have a night?

It seems that as far as Izabel's not-a-body is concerned, nighttime on Phang starts whenever Hazel has dinner. Izabel pops into existence as her charge is dawdling over the part of her meal that is actually, unambiguously vegetables. Jabarah's kids, perhaps because they've rarely had enough food to waste, are doing a much better job of cleaning up what Alana and Marko have put out.

"Hi, little goob!" says Izabel.

"Izabel!" Hazel's sulky face lights up. "Now we can go play outside!"

"Not until those veggies are gone," says Izabel. "And don't you want dessert?" She floats innocently over to where Alana has a massive pan and a spoon ready by a stack of little bowls. "Mmm, yellowberry pudding!"

"I'll eat your veggies," whispers Kurti. But Izabel can hear him: "Hazel, no veggies, no pudding."

"But you said that the veggies had to be gone! You didn't say how!" protests Izabel's kid.

"You're not _that_ little any more, little goob. You know what I meant. Wow, that pudding's still warm. It's the best that way, right, Alana?"

Alana has to turn away from the kids because she's about to lose it. She has her goofy smile on. It makes Izabel happy.

"Fine!" says Hazel, in a way that makes the word sound like a threat. She's her grandma's girl, all right. But she's eating the vegetables. Alana dishes out servings of pudding, and Jabarah distributes the bowls. The last gooey sugary spoonful is gone inside of five minutes, and Izabel leads the parade of older kids out into what passes for the tree-ship's front yard on Phang.

There's the wreck of a little house on the far edge of it. Izabel and all the grown-ups (except that robot, who's too good for stuff like that) have been over it like a dozen times to make it kid-safe. It has some furniture in its three little rooms, a bathtub that doesn't fill, and kitchen appliances with no power. The kids have added to these accoutrements a collection of broken dishes, improvised dolls and play-animals, and woebegone bits of tech. There's also a grove of dead trees, all kinds of blocks of broken pavement (some of them as tall as Petrichor), some big old water pipes, and a bare patch of ground where the kids sometimes play almost-organized games like kickball. The tree-ship has provided an assortment of big fruits that make passable balls.

Tonight (and Izabel figures she might was well call it night) the yard-ape crew want to play hide-and-seek. "OK, you know the rules," Izabel reminds them. The rules are mainly about not leaving the area that can be seen from the ship.

"Yeah, yeah," says Hazel, still grumpy about the vegetables. "We know. Like you said, I'm not that little anymore."

"You're still my chubby baby, though."

"Izabel!" yells Hazel, horrified. 

"OK, OK," says Kurti, who knows an incoming fussing match when he hears one. "One, two, three…."

"Not It!" the kids all shriek, more or less in unison—even Hazel. Ghada's the slowest off the dime, so she hides her fuzzy face against her folded arms atop a standing pipe and starts to count loudly: "One two three four…."

The crew scatter. Floating up and down, Izabel spots their hiding places: Kurti in a pipe over there, Elif flat on his tummy under a skeletal snarl of bushes, Nizar behind one of the paving blocks.

Hazel runs into the playhouse.

Well, there's not much to worry about _that_. The bed and the closets are really the only things left that would hide a kid. The fridge doesn't have a door anymore, and Hazel's too big for the long-cold oven in the gutted little stove.

Ghada finishes her count and shrieks "I'm gonna get you!" before she runs around trying to find her playmates. She flushes Elif out almost at once and chases him across the clearing. Meanwhile Kurti manages to steal "home" at the standing pipe. Ghada tags Elif out and then starts quartering the clearing for the other two. She pounces on Nizar after passing him by several times, to the amusement of Kurti and Elif. So Hazel is the winner.

"Hazel!"

"Ha-a-aze! You won! C'mon, it's your turn to count!"

Silence.

"Wow," says Kurti at last: "Where did she hide, Izabel?"

Izabel feels a creepy cold in her not-a-gut. Which isn't right, because her guts should be cold all the time. "She went in the house."

"Maybe she's still mad at you and that's why she's not coming," suggests Ghada.

"Yeah, maybe, fuzz-baby," says Izabel, grateful for the thought. "Let's go find her anyway."

Whooping, they pile into the house, running around the two rooms downstairs and the one room upstairs. No Hazel. _Now_ Izabel is freaking out. She zooms down the stairs, about to whiz out the front door, when she hears Kurti calling from the kitchen.

When she goes there, he's standing by a hole in the floor that shouldn't exist. "What the ever-loving fark is _that?_ " Izabel snarls. She probably looks really scary, and for once she doesn't care.

Kurti shrinks back. "It's, it's a cellar. With a trapdoor. We found it in the corner under the triangle table."

"It was our secret," said Nizar, sadly. Because it sure as hell isn't a secret anymore.

"You dumb kids!" Izabel zooms right through the table in question and Kurti, who stumbles back and hits the remains of the fridge. Izabel peers down the hole. "Hazel?"

"Yeah, I'm here," says a sad little voice. "The ladder broke. I landed on my knee and it hurts. And now I can't climb up."

Izabel swooshes down the hole. The cellar is just dug out of the dirt, with a few big wooden beams to hold up the ceiling. The shelves have mostly broken, and there's a layer of nasty broken glass littered below them, with yucky, gleaming sticky stuff on some of it. The leftover pieces of the wooden ladder are still fastened to the wall, but the last five or six of its rungs are broken through.

"I should get your Dad, maybe Petrichor too," says Izabel, cross and worried. "Did you fall on the glass?"

"No," says Hazel. "I only just bumped my knee in the dirt here. Please don't get Daddy! I'll be in so much trouble!"

Hazel is scared of making her Dad angry. But she wasn't scared to come down here in the dark. Crazy little kid. "Little goob, this isn't safe. You guys should have told us we missed this when we cleaned up the house."

"Can't we just … put something down here I can climb up on? And tell Mommy and Daddy we just found it?"

Well, crud. Not telling Alana and Marko the truth would be a rotten, dishonest thing to do. But no one really got hurt. The kids bumped and banged and scraped themselves all the time.

And Hazel was staring at Izabel, her heart in her eyes.

"You know this was a bad, terrible thing to do, right?" says Izabel, looking up the hole.

The four furry faces peering down at her all nod, solemn.

"And I'll get in all kinds of trouble if the grownups ever find out?"

Nod nod, nod nod.

"All right," she says and sighs. "Go get one of the chairs, Kurti. And that rope we were trying to use for swings."

After a lot of debate and some false starts, the chair is lowered into the hole while Hazel presses herself to the dirt wall away from the glass. Then she climbs onto it and manages to reach the last intact rungs.

Once she's safe, the other kids pull the chair back up and put it and the rope back where they were. And then they all stream out of the house shouting about the trap door they found in the corner of the old kitchen.

"Wow," says Marko a few minutes later, shining a torch into the darkness and discovering the mess of glass and ancient preserves, "it's a good thing no one fell down there. I'm so glad you told us about this, little ones."

They all nod enthusiastically. Except for Izabel, who has to look away from Marko's earnest gaze.

Hazel gets a cold pack on her bumped knee, which she artfully explains happened when she tripped coming downstairs in the house. And then Izabel tells them a very quiet story, Elif's favorite, for bedtime, and for once none of the bigger kids complains that it's boring. Alana and Jabarah and Marko tuck them all in. Izabel floats near the ceiling, feeling sad that she can't hug them. Usually she manages to ignore this, but tonight it's just one more nasty little detail of her unlife.

"Izabel?" whispers Hazel.

Izabel feels a little tug at her not-a-heart. She drifts down and spreads herself on the floor next to Hazel's bed. "What is it, little goob?"

"You're the best. I love you forever and ever."

That's the thing about babysitting little kids. Sometimes, just sometimes, they make it worth it.


End file.
